On Mon, 4 Aug 2003, Michael Day wrote:
>
> Following on from the "initial" value discussion, is it ever legal to use
> the inherit or initial keywords in a shorthand or compound property?
No. Hopefully the last few places where that was ambiguous in the 2.1 spec
are being cleared up, too (in particular, 'font: 1em inherit').
> If this is the case, would it be prudent for all the properties that do
> not have a defined initial value (color?) to be given a new keyword to
> refer to that ambiguous initial value.
The initial value of 'color' is UA defined, it could be, e.g., 'black'.
This is probably the value of one of the system colours. The WG is going
away from system colours, however, in favour of the 'appearance' property.
> Otherwise it is impossible to do some things, for example to set the
> border color to the default initial color (without also setting the text
> to that color).
That's impossible anyway at the moment (the initial value of
'border-*-color' is 'the value of the color property' not 'the initial
color'). However, I don't see a use case for this. When would you want to
set the border-color in this way? Or, for that matter, any other colour?
In particular, when would such a need not be satisfied by:
element { appearance: document: }
Cheers,
--
Ian Hickson )\._.,--....,'``. fL
"meow" /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
http://index.hixie.ch/ `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'